


Technical difficulties

by amcw177



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: ErenxJean, Jean makes bad decisions, M/M, alternate universe - copy shop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 15:03:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1692647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amcw177/pseuds/amcw177
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jean's night shift at the copy shop is pretty boring until a sleep-deprived, angry student called Eren stumbles in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Technical difficulties

**Author's Note:**

  * For [andreaphobia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/gifts).



> Written as a thank you to [andreaphobia](http://archiveofourown.org/users/andreaphobia/pseuds/andreaphobia), who made some things possible for me that would not have been possible otherwise. It's a really big deal for me and I feel like I haven't properly given thanks yet so here we are. It's a start, at least.
> 
> To be honest, I wanted this to be much longer but I'm in a terrible slump and barely anything can hold my interest for longer than five minutes these days. But I finished something and that hasn't happened in a while so yay!
> 
> Many thanks to [Lys ap Adin](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lysapadin/pseuds/Lys%20ap%20Adin) for beta-ing!

It’s 2:35 AM when the guy stumbles in, eyes wide from terror and red from Red Bull-enforced sleep deprivation. Jean barely looks up from his book when a massive box lands on his counter with a dull thud.

“I need to use one of your computers.” The guy’s voice is hoarse, his hair is a mess, and he looks about one hour away from murdering someone - typical college student pushing the limits of his deadline and thus a standard occurrence in this copy shop.

Jean nods his head towards the row of screens in the back of the shop. “Knock yourself out.” Half a year ago, when he started working nights here, he would have ripped the guy’s head off for being so rude. But then he learned that these people have been running on autopilot for sixteen hours by the time they enter the shop and nothing Jean says will filter through the haze of panic and fuck-it-all attitude. So, he just sits there, sipping his awful coffee from the machine’s leaky plastic cup, and lets the guy sort through his issues on his own.

He only looks up when the guy starts abusing the keyboard in a fashion that won’t leave enough keys in place to warrant the name. “Hey!” Jean yells, “if you need to let off some steam, do it with your own keyboard. You break it, you buy it.”

It’s quiet for a few moments, and Jean goes back to his book, when the guy suddenly appears in front of his counter like he fucking teleported there. He waves a disconnected keyboard in Jean’s face, snarling, “This doesn’t work.”

Up close the guy’s appearance screams ‘axe murderer’ even more than before. His pupils are blown wide enough to almost swallow up his green irises and Jean realises in horror that they are in fact close enough for him to notice that.

He wrangles the keyboard from the guy’s hands and inspects it thoroughly. To his surprise none of the keys are missing. “No wonder, the way you were banging around on it,” Jean says with a pointed glare. It doesn’t have the desired authoritarian effect. The guy starts heaving as if he’s going into an asthma attack and Jean panics a little because he never bothered to memorise the numbers on the emergency contacts sheet.

But then the guy lunges over the counter and grabs Jean by the collar, hauling him close enough for Jean to see the swollen red veins in his eyeballs. “You don’t understand. I need this. I need this to work _now_. I can’t wait-”

Jean doesn’t wait. He’s seen enough movies about serial killers to know how this ends. So, he hits the guy over the head with the keyboard.

\---

Eren wakes up with a thumping ache in his head and an alphabet strewn around him. He groans when his jaw joins in with the rest of his head and starts throbbing like someone punched him on the chin. Focusing is hard and everything is sort of double, but he can see a guy’s feet pacing behind the counter.

“No, he’s not dead,” Eren hears the guy say, “at least, I don’t think he is. Oh my god, Marco, what if I killed a man? I have nowhere to hide a body! I don’t even have a car!”

That sounds mildly worrying. Eren doesn’t want to be buried alive because some knucklehead thought he was dead. He shakily waves his arm. “H-hello? I’m not dead.”

He can’t see the guy behind the counter but there is silence for a moment and then whispering. “Marco? How long does it take for someone to turn into a zombie?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Eren huffs and scrambles onto hands and knees. It’s a bad idea. The tiles on the floor start to wobble and stretch into infinity before everything goes black. The last thing he feels is the cold, hard floor connecting with his face and somebody yelling, “I’m too pretty for jail!”

\---

So far, Marco has been an utter disappointment in the departments of zombie apocalypses and dealing with dead bodies. The only marginally useful comment he made was something about checking for a pulse and calling an ambulance. But first of all, Jean has to make sure he won’t be at the center of a murder trial.

He found an old hockey mask and a couple of knee guards that some girl on roller skates once forgot here, along with a broomstick. Armed with protective gear and cleaning equipment he approaches the motionless figure on the floor. The guy is drooling. Might be a good sign, provided that zombies don’t drool. Jean is a little fuzzy on the matter.

He pokes the guy with the handle of the broomstick, fully prepared to launch a counter attack, but nothing much happens. The guy groans and wiggles a bit but then goes completely still again.

“Shit,” Jean says to Moochie, the kitty-shaped tip jar. Her empty, toothy smile isn’t helping. Jean’s last first aid course was years ago. The only thing he vaguely remembers is putting his mouth on a dingy plastic puppet and something about recovery positions. But he can’t for the life of him remember which comes first and if either of them are even required.

“Hey!” Jean bellows, giving the guy another poke with this broomstick. “Hey, you, Freddie, wake up! Time to go home to Elm Street.”

“Name’s not Fr’ddie,” the guy mumbles against the tiles. His spit makes little bubbles when he talks. It’s disgusting. Jean wouldn’t have put his mouth anywhere near that. “Eren.”

Jean leans down (despite his better judgement). “What?”

“Eren,” the guy says again, much clearer this time, “M’ name’s Eren, you menace.”

“Menace?” Jean echoes. “ _I’m_ the menace? You came at me with a keyboard!”

‘Eren’ slowly gets his limbs back under him and detaches himself from the floor. He sits up, giving Jean a wobbly look somewhere between confusion and anger. “That’s not how I remember it.”

“Oh yeah?” Jean says triumphantly, waving his broomstick. “But that’s what I’m gonna tell the police.”

Eren squints up at him, rubbing his forehead. “You’re wearing a hockey mask and Barbie knee guards. I don’t know who the police are gonna believe.”

Jean looks down at himself. In retrospect, he could have done without the knee pads, probably. He wrestles out of the gear but keeps the broomstick close by - just in case. “I thought you were gonna kill me.”

“Really?” Eren shakes his head and warily stands on his feet. “‘Cause I thought you had, for a second there.”

Eren leans heavily on the counter, still clearly disoriented, and Jean feels a pang of guilt. Maybe more than a pang. Maybe more like the please-don’t-sue-me-I-have-nothing kind of guilt. “You okay there?” Jean asks carefully, eyeing the growing red spot on Eren’s forehead.

“Yeah, I’m-” Eren blinks a couple of times. “I’m okay. I think.”

“I should probably call an ambulance,” Jean says and reaches for the telephone.

Eren waves him off. “God, no.” He gestures at the computers in the corner. ”I don’t have time to go to the hospital. I need to get this finished.”

Jean observes Eren for a full minute as he sways and staggers towards the computers. He sighs and hangs up the phone without calling anybody, and hurries over to catch Eren before he smashes his face into one of the screens.

“You’re in no condition to do anything,” Jean declares and drags Eren over to the chairs by the wall. They only ever serve a real purpose during the day when it’s busiest and people have to wait to use the copy machines or the computers. Sometimes Jean puts two together and sleeps on them but tonight they’re the impromptu emergency waiting room.

“Okay, you sit here and I’ll go see if we have a first aid kit somewhere.” Jean gently pulls Eren into an upright position and walks over to the small bathroom cubicle that is carved into the room like somebody forgot about it in the original floor plans and drew it in afterwards, hoping that no one would notice. Behind some rolls of toilet paper, cleaning supplies, and a few porn magazines he does indeed discover a first aid bag. The label informs him that its use-by date was in 2008, but he reckons ice bags can’t really go bad.

He fills it with cold water and hands it to Eren, who gives him a groggy nod of thanks.

“You sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance?” Jean asks. “It’s just ‘cause I think I’m kinda obligated to call one.”

“In case of what?” Eren sneers. “In case you hit someone with a keyboard?”

Jean throws his hands up. “You were scaring the shit outta me, okay? What was I supposed to do?”

“Err, you could have told me to back off, for example.”

“I really don’t think you would have listened.” Jean shakes his head, shuddering at the memory of Eren’s blood-shot eyes almost popping out of their sockets. They look relatively normal now, thank God. As a matter of fact, they look kinda nice now that his pupils aren’t black holes anymore.

Eren frowns. “That bad, huh?” He stares off into the distance. Jean nods fervently and remembers something about water. He’s probably remembering it wrong but it gives him something to do. He gets a bottle of water from the vending machine. Their boss is too penny-pinching to actually order drinks for his employees but the first thing Connie showed him when he started was how to get into the vending machine without putting any money in.

“Sorry,” Eren says as he accepts the bottle. “About the scare, I mean. I’ve been running on fumes since Tuesday.”

Jean flops down on the seat next to Eren, hands in his pockets, and shrugs. “Could’ve started earlier.”

“Oh, don’t lecture me,” Eren groans, “my sister’s been doing that for the last two weeks. I did start early but then they switched my deadline and now I’m- I’m-” He waves the bottle at the computer like he means to stab it. “Now I’m fucked.”

The file is still open on the screen, the cursor the blinking evidence of failure. Jean knows the feeling. His own thesis is sitting on a laptop at home, several revisions short of being done. “How much you still missing?” Jean asks, despite himself.

“Just the conclusion.” Eren sinks lower in his chair, the ice bag like a wet party hat on his head. “But I still need to do so many edits. I’ve got to hand in three copies by eight tomorrow-” He squeezes his eyes shut and flails his arms. “-today! I’ll never get it done in time.”

Jean eyes the computer screen. He’s helped a few fellow students in his time. Some even so far that when Jean was done all they had to do was put their name on the first page. Night shifts have got to be good for something, after all.

“What’s your paper about?”

Eren looks up at him, suddenly curious. “ _‘ATP and its practical uses in bioenergetics.’_ Why?”

“Uhm, okay.” Jean rubs the back of his head. “I was hoping for something like _‘How to make a potato light bulb,’_ but okay.” He stands up and grabs the swivel chair from behind the counter and rolls it in front of the computer Eren picked. Eren watches with increasingly wide eyes as Jean unplugs the nearest keyboard and connects it to the PC.

“All right.” Jean cracks his knuckles. “Just the conclusion, right? Shouldn’t be too hard. It’s all basically just summing shit up and sounding very posh and certain about it.”

“Are you nuts?” Eren sprints over to him, pausing only to grab a hold of the back of Jean’s chair to keep from toppling over. “You can’t write my conclusion! They’ll know!”

Jean wipes the argument away like a pesky fly. “Bullshit. You know how many conclusions I’ve written? More than I’ve put my name on. So, shush, sit down, drink your damned water, and try not to faint.”

“Do you even have any idea what bioenergetics is?”

“No,” Jean says and starts reading. “But if you sit down and shut up I might.”

Eren’s hand slips from the chair and Jean gets ready to catch him but instead Eren just stares at him, long and in roughly the same way Jean is currently looking at the _‘Principles of Bioenergetics.’_ “Why are you doing this?” Eren asks eventually.

Jean shrugs and returns his attention to the screen. “I hit you over the head with a keyboard. I think it’s only fair that I fuck up your paper too.”

Eren laughs, low and surprisingly pleasant to the ear. “Just, please, tell me you’re good at this.”

“I’m good at this.” Jean points at the row of chairs. “Now, go sit down. Or better yet, lie down. If you pull two of ‘em together they make a decent bed. If you’ve never seen an actual bed, that is.”

“Okay. Whatever you say-” Eren pauses. “Hey, I don’t even know your name.”

“Jean.” He looks up briefly when they shake hands. “Sorry about the keyboard thing, by the way.” He squirms in his chair. “I probably overreacted a little bit.”

Eren nods his head, smirking. “Yeah, a little bit. The knee pads were completely unnecessary.”

“Lie the fuck down,” Jean snorts and turns the chair around so he can educate himself on ATP molecules and won’t have to look at Eren smiling anymore. Without the drool and the imminent fear of being responsible for somebody’s death Eren’s lips look a lot better than a plastic puppet’s.

\---

It takes them the rest of Jean’s shift to complete Eren’s paper and by the end of it Jean could probably bullshit his way through at least three of Eren’s courses. It’s fun, though. Once Eren comes down from his Red Bull high he’s actually pretty good company, if a bit sleepy. Jean feeds him godawful coffee from the vending machine in return for intel about signal transduction in kinases. Granted, the coffee’s only marginally healthier than Red Bull, but at least Eren doesn’t look like he’s about to go Ghost Rider on Jean when he drinks it.

At around 7:30 Jean sends Eren on his way with another complimentary coffee and three copies of his paper.

“Let me know how it turns out, okay?” Jean shouts as Eren stumbles past Connie on his way out.

“Will do!” Eren does a horrible impression of a salute and staggers backwards into an old lady walking her dog.

“Who was that?” Connie asks, chucking his backpack into a corner.

Jean signs the replacement form for the keyboard and puts it in his boss’s inbox. “Just a customer. Had to finish his paper last night.”

Connie looks over at the trash can that holds the wrecked keyboard. “Are you sure that’s all he did?”

“We did finish his paper.” Jean grins and punches out. “See you tonight!”

\---

Jean would be lying if he said that the following night shifts are even more boring than usual. He keeps looking at the door and then curses himself for doing so. He is disappointed every time a customer walks in who is not Eren and punishes himself with more amounts of dreadful coffee than usual.

The nights go by and Jean grows progressively angrier. Eren could at least come by to say thanks. Maybe bring him a treat. Maybe suck his dick.

Jean blames the rapid downward spiral of his thoughts to the gutter on his own deadline looming closer. He’s started bringing his laptop to work, along with heaps of books he still needs to wade through. But every time the door opens he gets this tight feeling in his chest, like somebody’s squeezing his heart. And every time he looks up it disappears and takes the warmth of anticipation with it.

He doesn’t even know what he expected. Eren was a one time customer in a pinch. They had a good time but that’s about it. Also, Jean did hit him in the face, so maybe that put a little damper on things. But when Eren left that morning he seemed to have forgotten all about it.

Fucking stupid, Red Bull-fueled shitheads, Jean thinks one night as he jerks at a bunch of jammed pages in machine 2. He slams the paper tray shut, punches in his code like he is trying to take out somebody’s eye, and prints a test page. The machine makes a noise like a dying lawn-mower and does nothing. That leaves Jean with limited options: He kicks it until there’s a visible shoe print.

“Rough night, huh?”

Jean whirls around, ready to unleash a litany of curses when he realises it’s Eren. He looks much less like a zombie this time. His hair is still a hopeless disaster but that seems to be perpetual. In his hands he holds a paper tray with two cups.

“I’ve had worse,” Jean says and runs his hands through his hair in an attempt to look somewhat presentable after his tantrum.

“I know.” Eren smiles. He sets the paper tray down on the counter. “I was there.”

Jean pretends he hasn’t been waiting for this very moment for the last week and a half. He busies himself behind the counter, pointedly ignoring Eren and his stupid cups of delicious smelling coffee. “You need anything?” He asks as if he just noticed Eren.

Eren takes out one of the cups and slides it over the counter. “Nope, not tonight.”

“What is that?” Jean glances down at the cup. It smells like fresh cappuccino with just a hint of cinnamon.

“Coffee.” Eren smiles broadly and takes off his coat, tossing it over the abused copy machine. “I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could say thank you and-”

“And coffee is all you could come up with?” Jean huffs.

“And,” Eren continues with a scolding look. He moves the cup closer to Jean. “I figured what this copy shop really needs is good coffee.”

“Wow, thanks for your concern for the shop,” Jean snarls. He picks up the cup anyway and takes a generous gulp, acting like his tongue isn’t on fire afterwards.

Meanwhile, Eren looks at him like he’s being exposed to really bad CGI. He shakes his head. “Okay, nobody can say I didn’t try.” He reaches for Jean’s cup. Jean doesn’t know why so he defends it with his life, which ends in a brief struggle over the counter and a lot of perfectly good coffee going to waste.

“Oops,” Jean says weakly while brown liquid is dripping from Eren’s sweater. The paper cup lies crumpled between them in a pool of rapidly cooling coffee.

Eren clears his throat, seemingly ignoring his ruined clothes, and plucks the cup from the coffee puddle. He holds it out to Jean, pointing at something that looks like handwriting:

_Will you go out with me?_

Jean narrows his eyes. “Is this thanks for the paper or because you like me?”

Eren throws the cup at him. It bounces off Jean’s forehead without leaving much of an impression. They stare at each other for a long time until Eren lets out a sharp breath. “You leave me no choice.” He clambers over the counter, slip-sliding through the spilled coffee, and somehow manages to get his arms around Jean’s shoulders.

Jean is just glad that there are no keyboards nearby because he might have broken one himself when Eren kisses him - probably to hit himself to check if this is really happening. Eren comes to sit on the counter and manoeuvres Jean between his thighs. There’s a lot of multitasking going on that Jean wouldn’t have given Eren credit for. He never breaks the kiss, only to say, “How’s that for a thank you, dimwit?”

Jean cocks his head to the side, pretending to mull it over. “Nice, but what was that at the end there?”

Eren grins and kisses him again.


End file.
